Surfacing (im)possible victims: the role of gender, sexuality and power in constructing the conditions of possibility for victims of female sex abuse
Date
2015-08-31
Authors
Kramer, Sherianne
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Abstract
Female sex abuse (FSA) has recently emerged as an object of enquiry in the academy
and medico-legal systems both globally and in South Africa. However, the academic
research is primarily focused on perpetrators, resulting in very limited information on
victims. Victim data that are available are based mainly on studies conducted with
perpetrators. FSA victimhood is underexplored and many victims remain invisible to
the criminal justice and health systems and are barely discernible as objects of human
science knowledge. Despite the accent on vulnerable populations and human rights in
the contemporary world, there is very little work on precisely why these victims
remain invisible. Accordingly, this research aims to identify the cultural conditions of
possibility for FSA victimhood as a means to advance contemporary critical
understandings of the role of gender and sexuality as instrument-effects of modern
power. The study’s objectives were achieved by interviewing persons who selfidentified
as FSA victims. A Foucauldian informed discourse analysis was employed
to interpret the transcriptions of these interviews and to explore conditions of
possibility for FSA victimhood as they were constructed in the interview context. The
findings illustrate precisely how deeply engrained constructions of gender and
sexuality both produce and constrain the possibilities for reporting, disclosing and
self-identifying victimhood. Overall, a particular configuration of access to nonnormative
psychological, gender and ‘sex’ discourses, mostly mediated by the
internet and incited through the confessional context of the interview, provides the
possibilities for an identification as a victim of female sex abuse. These points of
identification are coordinates for disrupting normative understandings of gender,
sexuality and power in sex abuse and thus constitute the beginnings of a counterknowledge
on transgressive sexualities. This counter-knowledge will further
contribute to critical accounts of the way that power/knowledge produces, reifies and
naturalises human subjects through technologies of sexuality.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in
fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by thesis in the field of Psychology.
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2014